Aftermath

A New Global Economic Order?

Craig Calhoun, Georgi Derluguian, 0

Publication Year: 2011

“Remarkable in its geographic reach and analytical reach, this book offers timely food for thought to social scientists and policy makers interested in explaining the relative success and decline of societies in the age of neoliberalism.”

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

This collection is meant to start a conversation across political, moral,
and religious divides on the problems of trust in public life. That interchange
required that authors receive each others’ manuscripts so as to
comment on each others’ work. For managing the essays as they came in
and went out...

Introduction

At the time, it seemed that 1998 would never end. On January 21, when
most of us were still keeping our New Year’s resolutions, Independent
Counsel Kenneth Starr announced an investigation of President Clinton
for perjury and obstruction of justice. The Counsel’s suspicions stemmed
from a pending...

Part I. Politics

Chapter 1. A Case Study in Group Polarization (with Warnings for the Future)

Consider some remarkable numbers. In the House of Representatives,
223 of 228 Republicans, or 98 percent, voted for impeachment on at least
one count, whereas 5 of 206 Democrats, or 2 percent, voted for impeachment
on at least one count. In the Senate, 51 of 55 Republicans, or 93 percent,
voted to remove...

Chapter 2. Sex and Politics at the Close of the Twentieth Century: A Feminist Looks Back at the Clinton Impeachment
and the Thomas Confirmation Hearings

When the Lewinsky scandal was fresh, when we were all still wondering
how far the press would go, and whether this bimbo eruption would have
political legs, the reaction of feminists to the President’s Predicament was
eagerly anticipated. In time it became clear that feminism had found its
place in the Democratic...

For a full year and more, the United States found itself in the throes of an
often acrimonious round of debates concerning what is public and what
is private in light of the nature of the impeachment charges brought
against President Bill Clinton by the U.S. House of Representatives.
Nothing was resolved...

Chapter 4. Everything You Thought You Knew about Impeachment Is Wrong

If we had to describe, in two or three sentences, the surpassing oddness of
Clinton’s impeachment, it would go something like this: A Democratic
president, by any reasonable definition of the term, had “sex” with a
twenty-two-year-old White House intern and repeatedly lied about it,
both publicly and under...

Chapter 5. Pierre Elliot Trudeau: A Canadian Scandal?

The attack on the personal morality of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, one-time
flamboyant Prime Minister of Canada, is comparable only in some respects
to the scandal surrounding Bill Clinton.1 Trudeau’s “crimes” were
grounded in his politics and only secondarily in his lifestyle. His perceived
public harm...

Part II. Law

Chapter 6. Comparing the Independent Counsel to Other Prosecutors: Privilege and Other Issues

The turnover of tape recordings was pivotal in the crisis that led to the
resignation of President Nixon. Litigation over questions of privilege
concerning tapes subpoenaed by the grand jury led to the October 20,
1973 Saturday Night Massacre, the event that put impeachment of the
President on the...

Chapter 7. Legalizing Outrage

In the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal’s early stages the makers of public opinion
analyzed the affair in moral terms. They disagreed on exactly what
was wrong with Clinton’s conduct. Some condemned him for adultery,
some for betraying the implicit compact with his wife and the people that
had once...

Chapter 9. Sex, Harm, and Impeachment

Conservative and liberal legal commentators on the Clinton impeachment
agreed on very little, but they agreed emphatically on the characterization
of the various sexual behaviors which triggered the scandal. They
all agreed that the President’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky,
although indecorous...

Chapter 10. Impeachment: A (Civil) Religious Perspective

Impeachment is one area of politics and government which inescapably
impinges on America’s civil religion—Constitutionalism. If anything
separates American democracy from the way that it is practiced elsewhere
in the world it is this quasi-religious reverence for the Constitution. This
attitude is an...

Chapter 11. The Constitutional Politics of the Clinton Impeachment

The U.S. Constitution is incomplete. Even when read in light of their
original understanding, its express terms do not define precisely the ways
in which many functions of a modern state are to be carried out. Sometimes
we fill in the Constitution’s meaning by asking the Supreme Court
to interpret it. Sometimes...

Part III. Shaping Public Opinion

Chapter 12. Ontology in the Clinton Era

Even though I’m not writing a book about cynicism, but only a response
to the memory of things past, I find this quotation from Louis Menand’s
essay an even better epigraph, for the cynicism that interests me here is
the cynicism of the press and, even more, the news media that most of us
tend to turn...

Chapter 13. All We Had to Do Was Rationalize the Sex

Yes, President Clinton lied, but he lied about sex—consensual sex. For
those who opposed impeachment, the fact that the President lied was
never more than half the story. The other half, the important half, was the
lie itself. For the supporters of impeachment, just the opposite was true.
No matter what...

Chapter 14. Perjury and Impeachment: The Rule of Law or the
Rule of Lawyers?

It was a bad year for the Rule of Law.1 In fact, the 1990s was a bad decade
for the Rule of Law. Through Court TV, the world saw legal gamesmanship
relegate to a back seat the question of whether O. J. Simpson really
killed his former wife and her friend. Then, beginning with the sensational
disclosure...

Chapter 15. Impeachment and Enchanting Arts

Why revisit the “Clinton Scandal,” wading waist-deep in the yellow confetti
of previous punditry? Well, free from calls for clairvoyance or for
calming jitters about The System’s death rattle, one might inquire what
we gained from Impeachment besides another slam-bang episode in a
Punch-and-Judy...

Chapter 16. A Year after the Acquittal in the Impeachment Trial

The President’s more reflective side emerges late in the day. For example
recently, at a fund-raiser at the Waldorf-Astoria, while Luther Vandross
was singing Evergreen for him, the President whispered loudly to those at
his table that this was, he thought, the greatest love song of the last
twenty-five years. Yes...

Part IV. Religion

Chapter 17. An Un-Christian Pursuit

Few episodes in recent American history have polarized opinion as
sharply as the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. On the one side, a self-conscious,
self-righteously Christian fraction of the electorate banded together to
condemn the President for his escapades with Ms. Lewinsky, and for his
attempts to conceal, misrepresent...

Chapter 18. Abuse of Power as a Cultural Construct

Politicians and pundits alike were mystified by the public support that
President Clinton maintained throughout the impeachment process.
With favorable job ratings at near record highs and no popular outcry for
the President’s removal ensuing from their own jeremiads or analyses,
commentors frequently...

Chapter 19. Bill Clinton and the American Character

That the country would be better off stuck with him rather than having removed
him from office was, many thought, the clinching argument of Dale
Bumpers, former Senator from Arkansas, during the Senate trial. “If you
have difficulty because of an intense dislike of the President, and that’s understandable...

Chapter 20. The Clinton Scandal: Law and Morals

The Clinton scandal is supposed to have been an event that shows the essential
difference between conservatives and liberals in the United States,
especially their different views of the relation between law and morals. All
conservatives are supposed to have been in favor of the impeachment of
President Clinton...

Part V. The Political Is Personal

Chapter 21. The Spectacle and the Libertine

What was going on last year anyway?1 Monica, Clinton, the Republicans:
some kind of freight train through our collective life, massive, unavoidable,
by turns exciting, gripping, and then gone, as suddenly as it had
come. A year ago an interdisciplinary Monica festival like this would
surely have convened...

Chapter 22. The Political Is Personal

My introduction to Bill Clinton was through the 1992 Democratic primaries.
The field was filled with second stringers as the heavy hitters—Al
Gore, for example—sat out the season thinking George Bush unbeatable.
The traveling road show filling my television left me convinced that all
Bill Clinton wanted...

Chapter 23. Dropped Drawers: A Viewpoint

At first I was a bit troubled by being asked to write a response to the Clinton
impeachment process. I watched as little as possible of the impeachment
proceeding on television, and I completely avoided the Monica
Lewinsky interviews. Why go there when you can watch Moonstruck for
the 9,782nd time? For...

Conclusion: The Penultimate: The Meaning of
Impeachment and Liberal Governance

“Where are we now?”1 This is not merely a question of place but of spirit.
The recent impeachment and trial of William Jefferson Clinton provides an
instructive point of departure for analysis because it captures the interaction
between our law and our morality. The Clinton impeachment defines
political, cultural...

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